When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space… Source When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am qu...

CHICAGO (July 1, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced it is an official technology partner of 23XI Racing,  one of the top teams competing in the  NASCAR Cup Series  team .   As part of the partnership, Shield AI and 23XI Racing are integrating Shield AI’s  Hivemind Benchmark , a software analytics tool that collects, processes and visualizes performance data to support driver development...

Harry Lewis pointed Bill and me to Gottfried Leibniz's 1677 treatise  The True Method  (translated from the original French ). I highly recommend taking the time to read this three page document where he talks about formalizing all human knowledge. The second paragraph has some of the intuition for P v NP three centuries before Cook, Levin and Gödel .  But knowledge depends on proof, and discovering proofs requires a certain method that is not known to everyone. Every person is capable of...

This morning Mr Overkill sent me the link to the AI Compass test, which I guess is a spin on the famous political compass test. It’s a bunch of questions—27? 29? 15? Who knows!—and at the end you get your location on the map and your archetype, from a list of 30. It’s harmless fun, and I found the results so far to be fairly accurate. If you end up taking the quiz, let me know if your result was accurate. Or even better, blog about it! Thank you for keeping RSS...

"The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic. "Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir" by Craig Mod - a kind of travelogue of the author walking across Japan's Kii peninsula, mixed with his childhood memories and impressions of life in Japan in general. It's a...

0.0 Context Setting Monday, 29 June 2026 in Portland, Oregon, where the U.S. Supreme Court is definitely asserting its supremacy and I have belatedly realized that the Not A War On Iran is perhaps the first war that has business hours, i.e. it only runs when the stock markets are closed? One thing that caught my attention this time. Hey, did you know I do consulting ? I totally do consulting and I bet some of you know people who need my help. 1.0 Things That Caught My Attention 1.1...

Authors: Lequn Wang , J iangwei Pan , and Linas Baltrunas Figure 1. Autoregressive homepage generation. GenPage builds a Netflix homepage one row or entity at a time, each one conditioned on what’s already on the page and the user’s context. Introduction The Netflix homepage is the first thing users see when they open the app and the primary way they discover content to enjoy. Almost every part of it is personalized, including which rows appear, which entities show up within those rows, ...

For the past 3 years, AI evals have been my professional focus. 1 The most common objection I hear to evals is “our product is hard to eval”. This objection is a product smell. Artifacts that are hard for you to verify are often hard for users too. In the worst case, users have to redo the work from scratch to verify the output. More importantly, designing your product for ease of verification should come before building evals. In this post, I’ll walk through three products I advised ...

The European Union AI Act will begin to be enforceable in August 2026, one month from now 1 . One of the biggest new requirements is Article 50 , which requires all AI outputs to be “detectable as artificially generated”. In other words, if LLM providers want to do business in the EU, they will have to apply a watermark to their outputs 2 : some hidden signature that can be used to identify AI content. LLM text watermarking is a fascinating problem. Like the best engineering problems, i...

Both the ones I tried were… fine. Too sweet for my taste, but otherwise unremarkable. I don’t harbour strong feelings for the flavour, smell, mouth feel, or texture. They existed in a can, I drank them, then got on with my day. Another thing ticked off the list! Only took me how many years? By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-07-01. Both the ones I tried were… fine. Too sweet for my taste, but otherwise unremarkable. I don’t harbour strong feelings for the flavour, smell, mouth feel, ...

We’re proud to announce that the new 2027 calendar with art from the most talented Tyler Jacobson  will be available for sale on 7/21 and here is a PRE-ORDER LINK Experience the iconic characters of Westeros with artist Tyler Jacobson’s twelve stunning calendar illustrations, plus an exclusive thirteenth bonus fold-out poster. Discover reimagined images of beloved series players, as well as some never seen before. From their intimate moments to great battles, from family portraits and...

Our 2 hens have finished sitting on the Guinea fowl eggs - out of 10, we managed to hatch 5 of them. The chicken eggs we have in the incubator won't be ready for another week or so. Excited to see how many of them we get. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Our 2 hens have fi...

The eighth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 8, I chat with Brennan , the author of brennan.day . We talk about, among other things, writing routines, building community in the indie web, "start here" pages on personal websites, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Brennan brennan.day The eighth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weav...

Programming note; this is the 150th issue of NULL BITMAP, and NULL BITMAP will be going on a hiatus for a while, maybe just for the Summer, maybe indefinitely. I think I need a bit of a break from it and I don't think the weekly cadence is serving me like it once did. I have been poking around the Jujutsu repo recently, and I was very pleased to realize that this thing has a whole query language and query planner baked inside of it. This was expected, I guess, if you spent five seconds inter...

June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation. I’m going to share one extra link up here with you though, but it’s not my fault if it wrecks your productivity! My friend Kris Jenkins has written this devishly simple but addictive browser-based game: Escape the Moon . June has been a busy month—113 links below for your enjoyment and delectation. I’m going to share one extra link up here with you though, but it’s not my fault if it wrec...

I’m reviewing two books here with their origins in the mid-1970s microcomputer revolution: David Pogue ‘s Apple – The First 50 Years Ben Zotto ‘s Go Computer Now – How Sphere Invented the Modern Microcomputer – Then Disappeared These two companies – Apple and Sphere – started at around the same time with similar products. Yet the two corporate histories are quite a contrast. Apple is a wild success, becoming one of the largest companies on the planet. Spher...

Yesterday I published some benchmarks of Hardwood 1.0 on my Threadripper. Someone suggested I run the One Billion Row Challenge too, to see how it does, so here it is! Gunnar Morling ran the original benchmarks on an EPYC 7502P, Zen 2, 32 cores with 128 GB of RAM. The official challenge was on 8 cores (sequentially chosen) plus a bonus of all 32 cores. I chose to run the benchmark using 9 contenders from the published 8 and 32 core results. The 9 contenders I ran were thomaswue , artsiomkorz...

They won't stay silent forever. They won't stay silent forever.

shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to record a video of that routine. I've written before about the importance of having coding agents produce demos of their work; this is my latest attempt at enabling them to do that. Here's an example video created using shot-scraper video , exercising a still in development feature adding the ...

Linux 7.1 is now here, and of course with it comes another progress report. We’ve got M3 progress, Apple bugs, and more! Welcome back Master Boot Record When you long-press the power button on your Mac to bring up the boot picker (or use the Startup Disk application), what you see listed as Asahi is not actually the partition with the operating system on it. Apple’s boot tooling will only work with what it considers to be a “valid” macOS installation inside an APFS container. Linux 7.1 ...

Local First Conf is just two weeks away. We’re queuing up a slate of announcements and deep-dives on Patchwork, PlayBook, Backstitch, and more. Whether you’re there in person to see firsthand, or just subscribed to this newsletter to catch the post-conf roundup, July is looking to be a big month. But June has also been a big month! Today we’ll point you to a talk that launched Backstitch to a rapturous reception, an emotive dialog interrogating how we relate to LLMs, a new variable-leng...

Today I turn 45 which is, if you think about it, half of 90! And also about 30 years older than I feel on the inside! What is age? What is time? What is reality? I certainly don’t know. Current situation:  Pretty flowers Goobie says No journal ONLY PET. Monday 22 June: Study anatomy! Work! Lily to therapy! Go to the gym! Eat dinner! Study some more! Fall into bed thinking about tissues and bones! Tuesday 23 J...

As digital work routines become more prevalent, workers are adopting new forms of microbreak entertainment. Social casino platforms are increasingly visible as a downtime choice, offering brief, engaging experiences with familiar gaming mechanics. This development reflects changes in how workers approach relaxation and productivity in the contemporary workplace. In many modern work environments, the need for effective short breaks has prompted employees to explore digital option...